Small rural telephone companies have seen an “alarming increase” in calls not going through to their customers in recent weeks, said the National Telecommunications Cooperative Association in a strongly worded letter sent to the FCC yesterday. In the letter the NTCA implores the FCC to “take formal and decisive action in very short order” to resolve the rural call completion problem.

The letter includes a timeline spanning more than two years, detailing events surrounding rural call completion problems, which are typically created when an originating carrier or intermediate carrier fails to hand off a call to a rural telco that is destined to the rural telco’s customer. (The per-minute fees that carriers charge to complete calls to their customers are higher in rural areas to help cover the higher cost of delivering service there — and originating and intermediate carriers apparently are trying to avoid those charges by not completing calls to those customers, instead giving the originating caller a busy signal, erroneous pre-recorded message or the like.)

Although the ruling said violators could face cease-and-desist orders, forfeiture, license revocations and fines of up to $1.5 million, none of those actions have been taken against originating or intermediate carriers. In yesterday’s letter, the NTCA likens the situation to a game of “regulatory whack-a-mole” as carriers “apparently change routing tables for fear of regulatory sanction only to then reprogram them days or weeks later and thereby recreate the problem once again.”

The NTCA letter urges the FCC to take action before the year’s end or no later than next month to curb the ongoing problem, cautioning the commission that the problem “threatens to derail commerce during a busy season upon which many retailers rely and moreover creates serious risk of injury or even death as calls fail to reach their intended destinations.”

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4 comments

It’s a travesty that it will take someone dying because of this before anyone at the FCC gets serious. Seems like that is always the case. We as a society do not react until there is a tragedy. FCC- make us all proud and prove me wrong with this one issue.

The problem IS worse. Beyond calls never reaching the terminating party thousands of calls are delivered with an altered originating number. This is a deliberate act to disrupt commerce and personal interactions. Just today I fielded a complaint from a parent who didn't pick up their child's call because the originating number was altered. Our network has thousands of these daily

Yes someone will die from these underhanded intentional acts. How cowardly, instead of debating an issue on it's merit the carriers and their underlyings disrupt terminating companies and their customers. It is nothing less than vandalism and ongoing criminal activity.